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Improved treatment allowing more HIV-positive women to get pregnant: study

VANCOUVER -- Lisa Partridge was 14 when she learned she was HIV-positive.

The teenager living in Comox, B.C., underwent a tainted blood transfusion when she was an infant in Romania. When she fell terribly ill at age one, her distraught parents searched for a cause until a doctor finally recommended HIV testing.

She tested positive. For the next 13 years, she took a daily cocktail of pills that she believed were for a congenital heart defect, from which she also suffers. When her parents told her the truth, she was stunned.

"I kind of remember freaking out a little bit and being like, 'Oh my God,' " recalled Partridge, now 27. "But then I did more research into it and it's not as bad as people thought it was."

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In British Columbia, among pregnant women living with HIV who are successfully engaged in treatment, there has not been a single HIV transmission from a mother to child in over 20 years, said Kaida.

One major reason for that impressive statistic is the hard work of the Oak Tree Clinic, the Vancouver-based provincial referral centre for women living with HIV and their families, said co-author Kate Salters.

"We are really leading the charge in that capacity," said Salters, who is based at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The authors analyzed data involving 1,165 women living with HIV. Two-hundred-seventy-eight women reported 492 pregnancies after diagnosis, 61 per cent of which were unintended.

The rate at which women with HIV are getting pregnant is lower than that of women without HIV, but the rate of unintended pregnancies is much higher. Among the general population, just 27 per cent of pregnancies are unplanned.

Kaida said unintended doesn't necessarily mean unwanted, but the study does suggest there are gaps in reproductive planning for HIV-positive women. There tends to be an over-reliance on the male condom, which has a relatively high failure rate, she said.